Toulouse-Lautrec's images of his favourite muse, Jane Avril, prove there was
much more to him than the excesses of Montmartre. Rating * * * *

Poor Toulouse-Lautrec is a victim of his own success. So popular are his posters of Montmartre’s cabaret clubs and performers, so many student dorms and faux-French bistros do they adorn, that it can be hard treating him as a serious artist. He’s synonymous with racy fin de siècle Paris, deemed as shallow as the nightlife he depicted, as disposable as the paper he printed on.

Factor in also the juicy life story – aristocratic dwarf quits estate for the bars and brothels of Paris, where he dies, aged 36, of alcoholism and syphilis – and it’s easy to see why his talent is so often overlooked. Lautrec’s mythologised life, and the belle époque legends his art inspired, rather overshadow that art itself.

To be fair, though, his posters were adverts, whose raison d’être was to invite superficial regard and make an instant impact. They were also cutting-edge creations.

Late-19th century advances in lithography meant prints could be made bigger, cheaper and more colourful than ever. Inspired by Japanese ukiyo-e prints – with their simplified forms, flat colours and oblique angles – Lautrec gave passers-by a short, sharp shot of the cabaret experience.

In Jane Avril at the Jardin de Paris, for instance, the high-kicking dancer is framed, mid-cancan, by the unnaturally curvy neck of a double-bass, being played in the foreground pit.

Of all the dancers Lautrec depicted, Jane Avril seems to have been his favourite, and their relationship is the subject of a fine, little exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery. Lautrec’s attitude to women was complex. Son of a doting mother and distant father, the little fellow had precious little luck with ladies, taking comfort in the arms of prostitutes instead.

He perhaps saw in Avril an outsider like himself. After fleeing home at 13, she was admitted with a nervous disorder to Paris’s mental hospital La Salpêtrière for 18 months, where she found a cure and vocation in dancing.

As if playing up to that past, she was said to dance in Montmartre like a “frenzied orchid”, earning the nickname Jane la Folle. Her USP was always eccentricity not raunchiness.

Perhaps more interesting than Lautrec’s posters are his paintings, capturing Avril off-duty and with a tenderness he offered no other dancer. Stripped of her performer’s mask, she commonly appears isolated, withdrawn and old beyond her (twentysomething) years.

In Jane Avril Leaving the Moulin Rouge, she’s lost in her own thoughts, making her lonely way from Paris’s most famous club. Her face is pallid and downcast, her body wrapped in a funereal longcoat. Lautrec’s sparse background touches of yellow and green are broken like Avril’s spirit.

One might assume his paintings were more truthful than his posters, capturing as they do the real woman behind the star. Yet, it’s part of Lautrec’s genius that he could collapse the distance between the two: in whatever medium, he only ever needed a few strokes to sum someone up.

Even in Jane Avril at the Jardin de Paris Avril looks slightly weary, pained even, struggling to hold her skirts up and dance. Is she deriving any pleasure of her own here, or is it all ours?

Lautrec and Avril were never more than good friends. But his final poster of her – 1899’s Jane Avril, created just weeks before his mental breakdown – marks an intriguing twist. As she dances, a serpent coils itself around a startled Avril, resting its head on her Edenic breasts and hissing up at her suggestively. Was this a belated admission on Lautrec’s part of long-suppressed, sexual feelings?

In his embrace of advertising and celebrity, Lautrec anticipated Warhol by 60 years. But he was also so much more.